Monday, November 01, 2010

I start being sick of this epic fail and many famous website do this ... I am Italian, I am living in Germany, but my OS as every software or device I have is in English ( and I don't know German yet ) !

The Problem

If you live in your country and you have software in your own language, you probably never spotted what I am talking about. Actually, what you have probably appreciated instead, is the fact if you write in your url bar www.google.com you'll find directly the one translated and relative to your country ... how cool is it?My tiny winy problem is that if I write the same right now, I am redirected to google.de .... most likely in German with all settings in German as well, even the confirm button, no matter if I managed somehow to reach that point and changed the language ...

How Difficult Is It

Every single fucking browser sends an Accept-Language header with 99.9% of the time the current browser language or, in the worst case scenario, the Operating System one.If it's not about the server, we have the same behavior on the client via navigator.language ...In both cases I am sending a bloody en-us string that cannot surely be confused with de-de one, isn't it? But it does not matter, in 2010 and its growing globalization, these "clever" websites still rely on IP address to define the spoken language, but how wrong is this?

Language IS Context Dependent

Let's imagine we are simply traveling ... OK? Good, We have hot spots services in the airport or we are having a coffee in some local chain with wireless connection ... OK? Now we try to visit websites we use to check from home, from our country, and never with a single problem, cookies or not .... we are in the cloud, the one we would like to use everywhere but being behind some other IP address, the cloud does not recognize us anymore ... still cool, uh?In few words, if we are simply surfing the web there is no reason in this world to trust the current provider for our spoken language.

Location And Laws Context

There are mainly and only two reasons our IP address should be considered, a map application unable to use the W3C Geolocation API, so we are more into a fallback situation, or country laws for all those services that may works differently accordingly with current country (e.g. YouTube)

Everything Else Is UX

If the website we use on daily basis does not recognize us instantly we may feel that something went terribly wrong, isn't it? And how many could freak out the moment even few links around a search field are in a completely extraneous language?Moreover, if I decided to use English software, rather than italian, it means I made a choice and surely I cannot really complain if websites are always in English even if I am in italy or Germany ... it's the other way round: I expect this, and I am instantly confused the moment this does not happen.

The Failing Google Chrome Attempt

The ridiculous part of this story is an evident UX conflicts inside Google teams, the search engine and the translation one.In my case, if I start Google Chrome and I go to google.com I am:

redirected into google.de, it does not matter if I explicitly typed .com

the whole search engine in in German

a top bar lazily informs me that the page is in German, would you like to translate?

Oh ... Really??? So the browser understands I am based on English but the server of the same company decided I am German ... how cool is it?The company that more cares of performances is doing a redirect, a lazy navigator.language analysis, in order to help me with the wrong choice made by the server ... and guess what? The translation team is not brilliant, is everything else that looks dumb!It must be said that at least I have a Google in English link easy to spot ... but many other sites don't!

User Agent Myths

A user agent should follow W3C standards and AFAIK all do, more or less. It is not about the browser, the platform, it is simply about the only thing that I do believe is consistent across every platform: the language. Of course it's easy to hack a userAgent in order to show a different language ... but who the hell gonna do it for daily browsing? Even the IP could be hacked via userAgent, the one that sends it, isn't it? So why on earth people adopted such silly strategy to define the user language?

The Internet Cafe Context

If we are still thinking about edge cases ... believe me, these are truly rare. Even an internet cafe, most of the time populated by foreigners, could simply create accounts and most used languages set for each account. As example, we could have the user English, the user Deutche, the user Italiano, etc etc ... and the moment we login with this user the OS, and hopefully the software, will be presented in the same language. At that point, every website that will present content based on IP language could be easily labeled as dumb, because in this world were everybody travels and therms as mobile are used on daily basis by marketing, companies behind the same marketing do not get it: it's NOT about the IP!